Simple Solutions

Or, Love Your Enemies

Since the US government started killing Iraqis (more than 26,000 at the latest count) I've been thinking a lot about the simplicity of and difficulties inherent in the Christian injunction to love our enemies. I've never felt like the Iraqi people were my enemies to begin with, or even that Saddam Hussein was, for that matter, so I've really been thinking about how Dubya has failed, once again, to live up to his own Christian principles in this. I'm sure if confronted with this failure, even by his own pastor, he'd splutter something along the lines of "it's not that simple!" But that's the real beauty of the command: it is that simple, and yet it's very, very hard.

Salon's review of a new book by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism, points up the difficulties very succinctly: In it, reviewer Matt Steinglass describes the knee-jerk reaction such a simple concept provokes.

The thrust of Calming the Fearful Mind is achingly simple, not to say simplistic. Hanh thinks we need to calm down and stop blowing things up:

"Misunderstanding, fear, anger, and hatred are the roots of terrorism. They cannot be located by the military … To uproot terrorism, we need to begin by looking in our hearts."

This kind of statement is guaranteed to cause steam to pour from a lot of ears, and not just pointy Vulcan neocon ones. Anyone who acknowledges the occasional necessity of organized violence in the political sphere will find it exasperatingly reductive. But what's perhaps most exasperating is the suspicion that at some level, Hanh is right. Who could deny that misunderstanding, fear, anger and hatred are the roots of terrorism? Who, in the midst of our woebegone misadventure in Iraq, could deny that the military is a poor tool for winning hearts and minds?

If your immediate reaction to Hahn's thinking is something along the lines of the angry exclamation, "what a load of crap!" ask yourself what you're so angry about, and then think about all the factors that you believe make this a much more complicated issue. The US's stated motives for invading Iraq were to prevent the use of WMDs, to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive regime, and introduce democracy. But what were the motives behind those motives? Did W really have the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart? If he had, would the US have become an invading army? Suppose Canada decided it was their neighborly duty to liberate the US from Dubya's oppressive and war-mongering regime? How happy would that make US citizens? The short of it is that invasion and occupation, for whatever reason, are seldom, if ever, seen as loving actions by those being invaded and occupied.

This doesn't even begin to address the ulterior motives for this war that are now coming to light, and which many already believed were the true motives for invasion: cheap access to Iraqi oil, business opportunities for Haliburton, arrogant machismo, and a political agenda of imperial ambition. None of these are altruistic, loving motives. But neither are the publicly stated ones. The use of WMDs, had there been any, could have been prevented by many other tactics (though it would have been good to be sure they were really there to begin with, as a start). Democracy, by its very nature, cannot be imposed from the outside; it has to arise from a percolating desire and underlying cultural philosophy and then perhaps be encouraged and supported by others who practice it. It's not a one-size-fits-all method of governance and it comes in many flavors, not just the US's.

It's this high-handed, arrogant, father-knows-best attitude that angers both US allies and our enemies, and who can blame them. There's nothing at all loving about about it, and if the US is a purportedly Christian nation, that should be its primary motivation, and the primary motivation of its Commander in Chief. But Dubya and his cronies don't really love their fellow human beings, any more than Nixon and Johnson loved the Vietnamese.

That just sounds crazy and childish, phrased that way. Or does it? Here's Hahn again, and the reviewer:

In the war with Vietnam, the Americans had the intention to save Vietnam from Communism. It was a good intention, but this desire to save us destroyed us ... The intention to love is not yet love. We must know how to love. True love doesn't destroy the object of its love.

One wonders: Did we really intend to love Vietnam, or Iraq? And then one thinks: Didn't we? Shouldn't we have? Why are we embarrassed by the word "love"? What violence in our disposition leads us to sneer at the word? What are we so angry at? What are we so afraid of?

We're afraid that it really is that simple. We're afraid that we're wrong, that we've been wrong for all the millennia of human history, that the centuries of war and bloodshed really do boil down to lack of love and compassion. We're afraid that we've failed a very simple but astonishingly difficult test. We have failed to love, as a species. We've failed to love ourselves, our families, our neighbors, people who are like us and people who aren't, people we don't even know, the land we live on and take from, the animals we live with, the whole planet and its inhabitants. Failed. Failed miserably.

The beauty of the injunction to love your enemies is that it is so simple, and the tragedy is that it's one of the hardest things we can attempt. True love doesn't destroy the object of its love. This is just a summation of the Biblical (1 Cor. 13:4-7) list of love's qualities:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Love does not demand its own way . . . It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Well, sometimes the hardest thing about practicing the principle of love is practicing a passive resistance, doing the right thing as an individual. If we cannot demand our own way, and yet cannot be glad about injustice, we need to find ways to spotlight love's results without coercion, shaming them into changing their ways. This the hard way to do things, admittedly. It's hard and slow and sometimes disheartening, and sometimes it's costly in terms of life, but it has the advantage of leaving the practitioner with conscience and principles intact and of making the other side look foolish and cruel. Two of the greatest modern practitioners, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Junior paid with their lives, but look at the legacies they left, without resorting to violence; internal resistance, international disapproval and economic sanctions eventually led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

How different would national policy be if it were based on the simple principle of loving both our neighbors and our enemies? If our national policy was one of respect, aid, negotiation, peaceful protest, of truthful discussion, mindful listening, respectful disagreement, if our leaders lived up to the letter and spirit of their religious convictions, how much more difficult would it be for Osama bin Laden to spin a case against the evils of the West, or of moderate Islam, for that matter?

We cannot save a person or village or a country or a world by harming it, and certainly not by destroying it. We can only destroy ourselves in the process, either literally or metaphorically by murdering our own best impulses, our true selves.

The Beatles were right: All you need is love. Go ahead, argue with that. See how silly you feel in the end.

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A footnote: Thich Nhat Hanh has another book from some years back called Living Buddha, Living Christ, which IIRC explores in depth the "love your enemies" concept.